Playgrounds are good

A couple of times (Protocols & Named Loops ) in the past few days I’ve needed to write and run a couple of tiny C or C++ snippets, and I’ve acutely felt the lack of Swift Playgrounds for it. It occurred to me that Playgrounds has been instrumental in my enjoyment of learning Swift - it’s just a bit magic to grab the closest device and noodle out an idea or to make sure I’ve understood a new concept.

In a conversation between Chris Lattner and Paul Hudson I’ve listened to recently, they discuss the value of Playgrounds and the excellent Swift book in bringing the community along from Objective C. I could not agree more about the value of these two.

As an alternative, I downloaded C Language app for the iPad. This seems like a reasonable editor that uses an online compiler - it worked for my purpose although it wasn’t real snappy.

A couple of alternatives in the app store mentioned the ability to compile offline - which didn’t make sense to me until I pressed build on this one and realised it was using a server somewhere to do that work. So this may well not be the best one for AUD5.

I was amazed to find heaps of online compilers for things which would have done the job just as well. I’ve bookmarked this one which does all sorts of languages including C and Swift.